Best Practice in Transformation - Does it Exist?

Best practice is an evolutionary process, say Hampshire's Jos Creese and Birmingham's Glyn Evans.

Jos Creese, head of IT, Hampshire County Council

It is very hard to specify exactly what best practice is and, to some extent, it would be a mistake to try to do so. If you specify best practice within a short period there will always be something better on its way - it is an evolutionary process.

We should be talking instead about the sort of outcomes we would expect to be delivered from the transformation agenda – the business benefits in terms of efficiency savings, or measurable service improvements.

Anyone who enters into a transformational programme without taking account of the HR issues is probably doomed to failure. It is an incredibly important part of change - the communication, the changing of working practices, the ability and willingness of managers and staff to be able to make the changes to understand why it is important. These things are critical to success.

My view is that perhaps the biggest obstacles we face are the ability of managers to lead change, and the collective willingness to throw away outmoded practices that are no longer efficient or able to cope with the volumes of demand that we now have.

You need to have competent change managers involved in a transformational project, and very few of us currently have enough of those skills in house. Some will be found in IT because a lot of this change is enabled by IT - so you need IT professionals who really understand the business and process of change. But equally there will be people in the business that are competent change managers who will have a knowledge of IT.

We need to grow these change management skills internally, but these change leaders also need to have independence from the individual business streams they have come from to avoid difficulties of vested interests.

In Hampshire we are bringing change managers in from outside to work with our own people with the intention of developing the skills and experience in house.

The basic issue is understanding what a transformation programme is really about. In my view this is one of the things that the CIO council has to work a bit harder on. Many councils still have the view that transformation is ‘automation through technology' or about significant changes around an existing service practice for efficiency.

Actually, transformation is a ‘re-plumbing' starting from the delivery of the service - what is the service that the public wants? How would that best be joined up, for example, across some of the different related services? And then working back and saying, what structures would we want in place? What policies, what procedures, what systems will actually enable that to happen?

Transformation is a fundamental, not an incremental, level of change; and that requires very different skills. It requires a different approach to risk management; it requires a different approach to performance and reward systems.

We should not expect every local authority to move forward on this at the same pace. Rather, we need to make sure that the vast majority are supported and, through transparency, expose where the weak performance lies. Transparency in performance will identify both the best and the worst practices and the justification for the differences should lie with chief executives and chief officers.

Glyn Evans, assistant to the chief executive on transformation, Birmingham City Council

I do not think that there is anything recognised as best practice at the moment.

One of the challenges we have is that we don't really have anything that looks like a working definition of transformation. So how can we have best practice in something when we don't even know what that something is?

To me transformation is about making a step change in service delivery. It is not just doing ‘continuous improvement'. At the end of a transformation process the service that has been transformed will look significantly different to the service as it was previously configured. At the heart of transformation lies a complete redesign of the service.

But it is not redesigning for redesigning's sake – there must be clear outcomes and goals. In Birmingham every transformation project has to have a set of measurable outcomes. So it is not just ‘we will get better'. It is ‘we will get better, by this amount, in this timescale'.

We look for three types of measurable outcomes in any project:
• an improved service;
• a more efficient service;
• greater officer job satisfaction.

One of the things often missed when arguing a transformational case is that there should be something in it for all stakeholders if possible. If you are going to expect people to willingly change the way they operate then the sort of jobs provided by public service should be better than those provided now. Change management, and cultural change, are inherent parts of a successful transformation process.

I am not convinced that the emphasis on BPR – business process reengineering – will actually deliver transformation. BPR is a different concept from service re-design – it is a process that came out of manufacturing so does not apply particularly well to service industries. If you are repetitively manufacturing widgets then BPR may well deliver efficiency savings, but you can't deliver social care as a purely repetitive set of processes. BPR may work for some council services, but does not so easily apply to the complexity of others, eg council tax benefits.

It worries me that we do not have a forum to discuss issues such as this within ‘best practice' at the moment. Without an environment where we can share experience – especially what turns out to be bad practice – we will never get to a real understanding about best practice.

Sharing experience about what doesn't work is often more valuable than sharing successes – it can illuminate the whole process. Local government is wary of admitting that something hasn't worked perhaps because of the overly critical reaction that it often gets.

Outside the work environment our lives have been transformed by technology. People are now very comfortable using technology in their private lives – from digital TV and mobile phones, to home PCs and iPODS – yet they don't take account of how the way we live our lives has transformed when they look at transformation in the workplace. They ignore the potential of what that technology can deliver which is basically how you can manipulate information and deliver it to the frontline service.

I think that how we manage information is the core on transformation - but ultimately it is the information that is important not the technology.

I believe that you can look at almost any service area and say, almost instantaneously, ‘we could do this differently, we could do it quicker, we could do it in a much more customer focused way, we could do it more efficiently, just by changing the way we manage and use information'.

This is an exert from the January/February 2007 issue of Local Government IT in Use magazine's Special Feature on the Local t-Gov Programme. To download a pdf of the full feature click here. To read the web version click here.